Liza Ward biography

Liza Ward

Liza Ward Biography

Liza Ward was born in New York City and holds degrees from Middlebury
College and the University of Montana. Her stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Antioch Review, and other publications, and were selected for the 2004 O. Henry Prize Stories and Harcourt's 2004 Best New American Voices collection. She lives in Massachusetts.

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Interview

A Conversation with Liza Ward

Your book is centered on the Charles Starkweather killing spree that
happened in 1957, before you were born. What drew you to this particular
story? What inspired you to write Outside Valentine?
In January of 1958, while my father was at boarding school on the east
coast, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate pushed their way into my
grandparents' home and murdered them. My great aunt and uncle became my
father's legal guardians and moved into the house where he had had grown up. I
used to visit them in the summers, never making the connection that such
horrible things had happened inside those walls.

For so long I was consumed by my grandparents' death. The nature of their
death was the only thing I knew about my father's parents. This tragedy cast a
heavy silence over my family. No one ever talked about who they had been. I
spent a great deal of time hungrily combing books searching for any sort of
detail that would bring me closer to understanding what had happened. I tried
to remember the carpets at my great aunt's house, the arrangement of
furniture, the arrowheads my father had collected as a boy, wondering if the
...

Readalikes

All the books below are recommended as readalikes for Liza Ward but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose readalikes

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of
contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota,
she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught ...
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William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of a dozen Cork O'Connor novels, including Northwest Angle and Trickster's Point, as well as the novel Ordinary Grace. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family.
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